Jockum Nordström is an artist with his own delicate, tentative and sensitive tone, that is rooted in an idiosyncratic world in which every line and gesture is carefully attuned and where every erasure has its function and meaning.
Every drawing is almost its own universe, with its own bizarre logic. Everything is intertwined and intersected. Anachronistic clothes, hats and moustaches, turn-of-the-century touches and eroticism, suburbia and architecture.
The surface is deceptively simple, but behind the pencil is the effort, the nightly work to make it happen. Behind it all there is also an almost childlike joy of discovery and dialogue with what is being told. The drawings speak to Jockum while he, with his musical and literary ear, chats tenderly with them.
In the exhibition, Jockum shows mobile sculptures for the first time – brittle and restless structures where chords and balance are constantly about to tip over into tabula rasa. Assembled from simple materials such as metal hangers, strips of wood or pieces of cardboard, from which bits of pictures, portraits from books or stained scraps of paper dangle in the air.
The fundamental driving force may be a kind of search for art’s primordial matter. Reductions in order to enter into the most fragile core of psychology. Remarkable, indispensable and courageous, beyond everything.
Jockum Nordström was born in 1963 and lives and works in Stockholm.
